New Faculty
Dr. Graham Layne
Department of Earth Sciences
Dr. Graham Layne, who joined Memorial University's Department of Earth Sciences on March 1, holds undergraduate and advanced degrees in geology from the University of Toronto (B.Sc. 1981, PhD 1988).
His doctoral research was in the field of mineral deposits geochemistry, studying the role of high temperature fluids in the deposition of metallic ores. He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1988 as a postdoctoral fellow, where he began his involvement with Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) as a tool for research in the fields of mineral deposits and volcanology. He subsequently moved to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) as a postdoctoral investigator, when the MIT facility relocated there in 1991.
From 1992 to 1995 Dr. Layne was the principal researcher in a National Science Foundation National Facility for SIMS located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a joint venture of the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories. There, he established a microanalysis facility to enable the chemical and isotopic study of lunar and planetary materials, including moon rocks returned by the Apollo missions, and the Martian Meteorite (ALH 84001) that became famous in the 1990s as possibly containing evidence of life on Mars.
In December 1995, he returned to WHOI as a research specialist, to undertake the development of a larger multi-user facility based around an advanced SIMS, the IMS 1270.
Dr. Layne, who grew up in Ottawa, is an internationally recognized authority in the use of SIMS for the quantitative elemental and isotopic analysis of natural materials. His research focuses on the chemistry of natural materials on a very small scale such as one day's worth of coral growing or specks of carbon interpreted as fossils of the first life on earth.
Dr. Layne said he chose Memorial University because of its strong Earth Sciences Department, but also because it is situated in a mineral resource-rich province and has a along history of supporting development and innovation in the field of instrumental microanalysis.